Learning in the flow of work

Think of the last training course you sent someone on. A day or two away from the desk, a binder, a buffet lunch — and then back to a job that had carried on without them. Be honest about how much of it survived contact with the following Monday. For most organisations the answer is: very little. We keep funding an approach to learning that the evidence, and our own experience, tell us mostly leaks away.

The problem is not effort or budget. It is shape. Periodic, classroom-style training was designed for a world where skills lasted a career and you could afford to top them up every so often. That world is gone. When a third of core skills turn over in a few years, learning cannot be a thing you stop work to do occasionally. It has to be woven into the work itself — continuous, contextual, and close to the moment of need.

And there is a second reason this matters now, beyond capability. Growth has become the currency of loyalty. The people you most want to keep will stay where they are visibly getting better — and leave where they stall.

There is a well-documented reason periodic training disappoints, and it has a name: the forgetting curve. More than a century ago Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that, without reinforcement, we shed most of what we learn within days. A burst of content delivered away from the job, with no immediate chance to apply it, is almost designed to be forgotten. The knowledge arrives, finds nowhere to attach, and drains away before it can become skill.

Two things make this worse than a waste of a day. First, the gap between learning and doing: skill forms when knowledge is used on a real task, soon and repeatedly — exactly what the off-site course denies. Second, relevance. Generic curricula teach the average need, not yours, at a time chosen by the calendar rather than the work. The result is the familiar paradox: organisations that spend heavily on “learning” whose people feel they are not growing.

Organisations spend heavily on “learning” whose people feel, accurately, that they are not growing.

If formal courses are not where capability mostly comes from, where does it? The long-standing 70-20-10 model — a heuristic from the Center for Creative Leadership, not a precise law — captures the intuition well: roughly seventy per cent of meaningful development happens through challenging work itself, about twenty per cent through other people (coaching, feedback, watching a peer), and only ten per cent through formal training. Whatever the exact split, the shape is the lesson: the job is the classroom.

This reframes the leader’s task entirely. If most learning happens in the work, then the design of the work — the stretch in an assignment, the access to a more experienced colleague, the feedback in the moment — is your learning strategy, whether you manage it or not. The L&D budget funds the ten per cent. The other ninety is set by how you lead.

The business case used to be made on capability alone. It is now also a retention case, and a strong one. LinkedIn’s research has long found that the overwhelming majority of employees — around 94% — would stay longer at an organisation that invested in their development. Its 2025 report sharpens the point: only about 36% of organisations behave as genuine “career-development champions,” and those that do are more profitable, retain people better, and lead on AI adoption. Growth is not a perk. It is a moat.

The logic is simple and human. People do not leave only for money; they leave when they feel themselves stalling — when next year looks like this year with a different date. A culture of visible, continuous growth answers the quiet question every talented person is asking: am I getting better here, or just getting older? Get that answer right and you keep the people your competitors are trying to hire.

Moving from periodic training to learning in the flow is less a budget decision than a design one. It means making the moment of need the trigger — a short, relevant resource available when the task demands it, not three months earlier in a classroom. It means treating every stretch assignment as a development opportunity to be chosen deliberately, every piece of feedback as a micro-lesson, every experienced colleague as a teacher whose time to coach is protected, not begrudged.

It also moves ownership. In the old model, learning belonged to an L&D department that ran events. In the emerging one, it belongs to the manager who shapes the work and the individual who drives their own growth — with L&D shifting from provider of courses to architect of the conditions. The shift is summarised below: not a tweak to the old model, but a different one.

You do not need a new platform to start. You need to lead the ninety per cent the budget never touched.

Do this and learning stops being a line item people opt into and becomes what it should be: the texture of an ordinary working day, and the reason your best people stay.

Stop sending people away to learn. Build a place where they can’t help but grow — and watch who stays.